The Takers

Conservatives seem to think that the poor deserve their fate because they are too lazy to do anything about their situation. And you know, in a funny way, they might be right. After all, somebody has to be voting for these politicians who claim that the rich are the “job creators” and that cutting taxes on the rich and getting rid of environmental and health regulations will make the world a better place.

On the other hand, now that the rich control all the major media in this country, we are constantly showered with propaganda, so it is no surprise that people believe it. But still, the people do have the power to vote these jokers out. What will it take for them to wake up?

Of course, corporations have now succeeded in eliminating net neutrality, which means that now rich corporations will be able to control your access to blogs such as this one. So even more propaganda and fewer dissenting voices.

Are we doomed to descend into some kind of multinational corporate feudalism? Call me crazy, but I’m still optimistic that the spirit that founded this great country is still alive and that we have a bright future. And, at least for now, I’m still on the air.

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This was written by Iron Knee. Posted on Tuesday, February 4, 2014, at 12:58 am. Filed under Irony. Tagged Economics. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

5 Comments

ebdoug wrote:

Do they control AP news or Christian Science Monitor?
I had a free college education, nothing to pay back, not a very good student from my inheritance. I’ve been yelling since Reagan was governor of California and took away free college education of the less fortunate. I had someone tell me recently that all he cares about is what happens in the little 5000 people town he lives in. I would bet that would be almost the whole population of this country. Give the lemmings a “Superb Owl” (that’s how spell check wants me to spell “SuperBowl”) and they are content.

I’m pretty sure I’ve made this point before, but I’ll do so again for this reason: I originally thought it silly, but now I am starting to find it somewhat reasonable. Increase the size of the U.S. House to 5000 seats and increase the number of Senators per state.

Here’s the breakdown of the numbers: At the time of the first Congress, the U.S. population was about 2.6 million. There were 26 Senators, making the ratio of 1 Senator to 100,000 people on average. There were 65 members of the House, creating a ratio of 1 member to 40,000 people. Now, the population is 311.6 million with 100 Senators, creating a ratio of 1 Senator to represent over 3 million people. The numbers get a little weird, because the 617,996 people that live in D.C. have no Senator. In the House, with 435 members, the ratio is about 1 Senator to 715,000 people. (Side note: All these numbers are just based on ratios of Congress to citizens according to census data. It makes no attempt to look at the ratio relative to number of eligible voters, which would be a nastier calculation. In fact, it would make the comparison look even worse now, because the citizenry side of the ratio would be considerably smaller!)

The amount of representation has not kept pace with the population increase. It is a whole lot easier for 26,000 people to take their Congressperson to task for doing a bad job than it is for 500,000 people to do so. It would drastically reduce apathy, because you would not be quite as inclined to dismiss your vote as “not counting.” Furthermore, it is significantly easier to gerrymander large districts in a way that essentially erases certain groups from representation. And lastly, it increases the cost for certain wealthy individuals to influence national policy. Instead of pumping money into 10 or so races, they now have to do that for 1000 or so, which would dilute their effect.

I should point out that this is not an original idea. In fact, it was the subject of the first proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was never ratified. If it were, and the cap was set at 1 Representative per 50,000 people, there would currently be 6,220 seats in the House.